Obama’s Libyan narrative

I think it was put best earlier this week when some columnist — I forget who — tweeted that you know things are bad when the Libyan president becomes more credible than the American president. The Obama administration asks us to believe that on September 11 — when there have already been protests at our embassies of various magnitude on almost every September 11 anniversary for over 10 years — hundreds of well-armed militants appeared to have benefited from inside information on our ambassador’s travel route and schedule, and used direct and indirect coordinated machine gun and RPG fire to “spontaneously” attack our embassy over an intolerant and provocative video. Worse, new reports claim that there was no protest prior to the attack — rather, there was just an attack.

Pay no mind of a lack of proper security for our embassies overseas, especially on a 9-11 anniversary. It’s easier to avoid accusations of incompetence if they can just blame it on some pesky Muslim hater. Instead of investigating this we’re too busy acting like brown shirts in jackboots, our Feds apparently asking a local police force to conduct a midnight raid on an alleged Los Angeles movie uploader. What country is this? Sure, I get it. The movie makers are intolerant asses, but if that were a crime then Michael Bay would have been arrested a long time ago. (It’s a joke, okay, but you get the point. Even jerks have freedom of speech in this country.)

A final point: it’s always something, right? If not a movie, than it’s a cartoon or comic strip or book or painting that offends the fanatics. You can make a urinal nativity and NYC intelligentsia will call it art, but one slight insult amongst the thin-skinned Islamic militants and we’re ready to arrest the “artist” and tear apart the Bill of Rights instead of universally and unconditionally condemning the murderers. And what message does this send the militants? Terrorism works.

But the Obama administration and their liberal media lapdogs are too busy pushing the narrative to pause and consider that.

[NRO] In the course of this impossible task, Ambassador Rice made a number of dubious claims, but perhaps none was more dangerous and stupid than this bold declarative to ABC’s Jake Tapper:

What transpired this week . . . in Cairo, in Benghazi, in many other parts of the region, was a direct result of a heinous and offensive video [entitled “The Innocence of Muslims”] that was widely disseminated, that the U.S. government had nothing to do with, which we have made clear is reprehensible and disgusting.

The baffling assertion that the protests were a spontaneous and unmediated reaction to an amateurish YouTube video that anteceded them by a month so strains credulity that we have to assume the administration doesn’t even believe it. House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) has said that there is preliminary evidence that the Benghazi attack was premeditated and well-planned. In Cairo, Mohammed al-Zawahiri, brother of al-Qaeda caporegime Ayman al-Zawahiri, was at the front of the horde. Other protesters were reportedly paid. They burned American flags and ran up al-Qaeda colors in their place. They chanted “Obama! Obama! We are all Osama!” And they did it all on the anniversary of September 11.

We may not think much of the president’s foreign policy, but we find it difficult to believe he could see all this and think “if it hadn’t been for that damned YouTube video . . . ”

The truth is that the video was a pretext, and the attacks the consequence of a deep current of anti-Western rage that persists in the Muslim world despite the president’s famous “Cairo speech” and the muddled engagement strategy for which it was the synecdoche. Because the administration cannot admit this — perhaps not even to itself — its spokesmen trot out patent absurdities such as Ambassador Rice’s and present them to a largely compliant media.